OT - Strategy games with GOOD AI

[sevenwarlocks]

Since no one has mentioned it - I thought the AI was pretty good in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. The problem of the AI disintegrating on large maps was there, to be sure, but on small maps, the AI could be surprising, and when it started a war with you, it usually had the troops to make for a serious invasion. The AI in SMAC seemed better than the AI in Civ4, to be sure, where the AI really doesn't even know how to effectively use different kinds of units in combination.

If I could change the AI of all games in one major way it would be this: the AI should not know which player is the human. Frankly, having an AI bulk itself up with extra units seems a less egregious form of cheating to me. If game designers followed this rule, I believe it would force them to design AI's that could generate competant game-plans, rather than just design a sort of collusion to make the game feel "balanced".

I say this because to have an effective plan, an AI need not be perfect, or even extremely complicated. The most important thing is that the AI have some plan. By which, I mean, a long-range plan that it will stick to - at least for a time. AI's that react on a turn by turn basis will never be effective. As a chess-master once said - it is better to have a bad plan than no plan at all.